Kinectimals Review

I can haz good virtual pet game?

The 9-year-old version of me really wants Kinectimals. It is at the top of his wish list. He's the kid that makes a beeline for Cat Canyon (by way of Tiger River) whenever he goes to the San Diego Zoo. He wants the game so bad, and he'll probably be able to overlook the game's many faults. If you know that kid, awesome, you have a Christmas present for him/her now, and can stop reading. Everyone else, listen up, because Kinectimals is far from perfect.

Let's get one thing straight: Kinectimals is the cutest game in existence. This is just a fact. It's Cute Overload: The Video Game. Frontier has put over 30 great looking felines in here, and they all animate well and look soft enough to reach out and pet (which is kind of the point). The environments are gorgeous, and everything is colorful and full of life.

Bumble, talking flying lemur fairy character voiced by Richard Horvitz of Invader Zim fame, acts as your guide through the island of Lemuria. He takes you to the Bonding Circle where you pick a cat to adopt. At the beginning you've got a limited selection, though it's the standard all stars of the Big Cat family: lion, tiger, leopard, cheetah, and panther. After giving the cat a name, and petting him a bunch, you get launched into the game. There's actually a loose narrative to the game about a pirate's treasure, and the various mysteries to the island, but for the most part it's very open ended. I like the structure the story provides, and though Bumble can get a bit annoying, he's pretty cute too.

From there Kinectimals becomes a "do whatever you want" game. You can pet, wash, play catch, throw Frisbees, jump rope, drive RC cars, and more. Being a Kinect game, all the actions are done through motion controls. You toss smaller balls to fetch, and kick the big ones. You can dangle a fish on a string, or teach your cat tricks by doing a variety of actions. Each toy starts a microgame experience, giving you goals. For instance, if I select a Frisbee, a little box will pop up, encouraging me to hit some targets, or to throw the disc a certain distance.

Anything and everything you do with the pet gives you money and experience points (more if you complete the goals that pop up). The money can be used to buy additional toys and furniture for your house, and the experience points unlock new game content. Each area has its own Discovery Bar that tracks your experience progress. As the bar fills up, you open up five mini-games, and eventually earn a new area to explore and play in.

The structure works really well for progression. New toys and mini-games unlock at a fast enough pace where I felt satisfied even playing just a short few minute long session. The game never stalls in its pacing, either. Your cat constantly brings up toys he wants to play with, or you can just pick whichever one you want.

This would all make for an awesome game, if the motion controls actually worked well. Granted, most of them work fine. I rarely had a problem teaching my Kinectimal a trick, or playing volleyball, or driving an RC car. But then I try to do something really basic like toss a ball, and it's a mess. Balls fly in all different directions, or they jump out of my hand of their own accord. Likewise the jumprope routinely lost track of my hand and would trip up my pet. Granted, with such an open game, you can easily just skip over these toys, but that's not a solution. Mini-games use almost all these motions, and there are numerous games that require you to toss objects, which can be really frustrating if you want to get a high score.

Kinectimals is also way too menu heavy. Doing anything in the game is a major process. I have to hold my arm out for a few second to open the toy box, wave my hand repeatedly to get to the type of object I want, hold, wave some more to select the specific toy, hold once more, and then finally play. It makes something as simple as scratching my cat behind the ears as big a process as traveling to the other side of the island (actually traveling across the map takes fewer menu commands, baffling enough). It keeps the game from being this immersive experience of cute cats, and just makes it feel like a very pretty looking computer program.

The Verdict

When Kinectimals was at its best I genuinely enjoyed what I played. I actually got excited when I found a Serval cub and got to adopt him. And I've said "Aaaw look! Cute!" more times in the past week than I will probably ever say again for the rest of my life. But I've also yelled in anger when I lost a mini-game for the fourth time because I couldn't toss a ball in the right spot. It's a Kinect game that is probably worth picking up if you've got youngsters, but it's not the immersive family experience it should have been.